I have recently realized that the major thing holding me back in my writing is a debilitating fear of failure masquerading as “no ideas.” I have tons of ideas! They’re very cool and interesting ideas! And then I go to write them and I’m staring at a blank page and suddenly all my shining ideas seem boring and cliche and I feel so utterly small and stupid that I abandon the whole endeavor and tell myself I’ll write once I discover a good idea.

Unfortunately, there is no idea on Earth good enough, and if there is a legitimately good idea, I tell myself I’m not good enough to write it.

I love writing! I love coming up with stories in my head! I have dozens of characters all ready and raring to go! I love playing with words and descriptions! I don’t want all of this to be ruined because I’m too scared to do anything with it.

My question is this: How do I breathe through my paralyzing anxiety and actually start to get words on the page?

—Fear, the Mind-Killer

Dear Fear,

This is a very, very common fear among writers and would-be writers. So first, take comfort in knowing you’re not alone. Lots of people have found ways to work through, over, around, or past this, and you will too.

Second, take pride in having written to me. I bet that was really hard. You may have heard that same voice telling you that you aren’t worthy to write in, or that I would never answer such an inane question, or any number of other discouraging things. But you wrote in anyway. You wrote in. You had an idea for a thing to write, and you wrote it, and you submitted it. In the very act of telling me that you are struggling to do this, you did it. I don’t say this to poke fun or to suggest that it’s all easy. I am saying: you did the thing, and you have thereby proved that you are capable of doing the thing again. When you’re wrestling with the blank page, you can tell yourself, “I wrote to the Story Nurse, even though it was very hard; I can do this too, even though it is very hard.” You can also think about what made it possible for you to write to me, and see whether it can be applied in some way to your fiction writing.

(And see, your question was not inane, and I am taking it seriously and giving it a complete and thorough answer, like any other question—because I believe in you, dear writer, and you deserve as much of my time and attention as anyone else who writes in.)

If anxiety like this comes up in other parts of your life, that’s a thing that’s probably worth talking with a therapist about, because getting support from someone with a clue is pretty essential to getting out from under anxiety like that. I hope you have good people around you who can help you find the resources you need.

With regard to writing specifically, here are some facts:

There are many writers who are terrible people. I don’t think you’re a terrible person, because you worry about whether you’re a terrible person, and in my experience, most genuinely terrible people don’t worry about that at all. But on the off chance that you are a terrible person, that doesn’t disqualify you from writing.

You cannot ruin your ideas. To prove this, write the idea down somewhere. Then, in a separate file or on a separate piece of paper, write the worst 200-word story you can think of based on that idea. The worst! Make it awful and boring and trite. Open it with a run-on sentence about a character waking up; end it with rocks falling out of a clear blue sky and killing everyone. Put in extra misspellings and homophones. Then go back to where you wrote down your idea. You will find it untouched and just as ready to be turned into a much better story if you decide that’s what you want to do with it. Or you can just enjoy the idea being a lovely little idea—that’s fine too. All writers have extra ideas kicking around that will never be written.

The only way to fail at writing is to fail to write. Your fear of failure is keeping you paradoxically trapped in this state where you write nothing and therefore are failing by definition. But don’t waste time beating yourself up over that; write anything at all, and you will have achieved a measure of success. (If you have a fear of success, this may be its own challenge. It’s also worth thinking about how you define success.)

Every story and book you’ve ever read started out as a much rougher draft. Don’t fall into the trap of comparing your first drafts with other people’s finished work. Not only does your draft not have to be polished, it’s actually better for you in the long run if it’s not. I’ve been a professional editor on and off for over 20 years, and my first drafts always look extremely polished—which means their inevitable flaws in areas like pacing, characterization, and plotting are hidden and harder to find. So if your drafts are rough and let all their issues hang out, that’s great! You’ll know exactly what you need to work on as you put your work through the revision process that every gleaming, beautiful book has gone through.

Playing is wonderful, not a waste of time. You say you love to play, so go ahead and play! Make a list of words that sound nice when you say them, and then read it out loud, savoring the way the words feel in your mouth. Write poetry. Write letters to friends. Write children’s stories. Write terrible puns. Have fun! Remember that you want to write because it’s fun. Rediscover writing with a playful heart.

As for your question of how to start:

Write down one word. Good. Now, a second. Maybe a third? Work up to more if you need to. But surely you can write one word, even if it’s “The” or “If” or “A”. And if you’ve written one word, surely you can write another.

You say you love writing stories in your head, so write a story in your head and then write down the story that is in your head. It may help to dictate it first and then transcribe the recording. In this way the initial creative action all happens in your head, where it’s safe, and the part that involves typing or writing becomes a little less emotionally fraught, not really any different from transcribing a podcast or a TV episode or something else that you heard somewhere and want to have in written form.

Start by writing something based on an idea that you care less about, so the stakes are lower. Give yourself practice projects where you feel more at ease and able to fool around and try new things.

If that still feels too fraught, make a practice of regularly doing other kinds of writing—blogging, journaling, news stories, Twitter threads—and periodically come back to fiction to see whether you can transfer the skills you’ve developed.

“Yes, and” your inner voice. The “yes” defuses the tension, moving away from argument rather than toward it; the “and” lets you go right on doing what you want to do.

“You’re a terrible person!” “Yes, and I’m going to go be a terrible person who writes things.”

“This story is crap!” “Yes, and once I finish it I’ll be able to revise it into being less crap. But I can’t do that until I finish it, so I’m going to keep going.”

“This is really hard and stressful!” “Yes, and it’s also worth doing because…” [you’re having fun, you’re writing something that matters a lot to you, whatever makes you want to come back to writing even when it’s hard]

“You should just give up!” “Yes, and I’m going to take a break as soon as I get to the end of this paragraph. That way I won’t burn myself out and can come back to it tomorrow.”

If you’re a social person, do shared writing sprints with other writers. If you don’t know many other writers, you can do mutual accountability with anyone: “Every time you go to the gym, I’ll do a writing sprint.”

Try setting time goals rather than word goals; “do as much as you can in 20 minutes” gently makes room for there to be times when you can’t do very much, while encouraging you to build the habit of setting aside time for writing.

Redefine the writing process as a revision process. Use Randy Ingermanson’s snowflake method or something similar to minimize the part that feels like making something out of nothing. The “creation” part of the snowflake method, the thing that turns the blank page into the page with writing on it, is writing just one short sentence. Everything after that is adaptation, development, revision—you can call it any number of things that aren’t “writing” and thereby route around the part of your brain that gets anxious about writing. Ingermanson calls his method a tool for “managing your creativity” and it sounds like that might be a useful thing for you to do if your creativity is feeling wild and uncontrollable and scary right now.

Or, go the other direction and be WILD and UNCONTROLLABLE and SCARY. Yell your stories out into an empty room. Scrawl all over the page with a crayon, like a child, and then crumple it up and throw it. Write melodrama full of characters who have deep and powerful emotions, who hate one another and love one another and agonize over incredibly difficult decisions, and make yourself weep over their passionate feelings. Become the thing you most fear, and realize that it’s actually not so bad.

You don’t have to be good enough or controlled enough or cautious enough or smart enough or anything enough to write. You already are enough. There is no standard to meet, no test to pass; we encourage tiny children to make up stories, and if they get to do it, so do you.

I’m hoping you can spend a bit of time talking about voice, and about how we control it. By voice, I don’t mean so much “which character is telling this story,” but more that intangible, know-it-when-you-read-it something-or-other that makes one person’s writing different from anyone else’s.

Here’s my problem/question. I have a pretty clear voice, by which I mean that stuff I write tends to sound like me. It’s not highly stylized; I write fairly straightforward commercial fiction. But there is a me-ness to it—the tone, the details that interest me, the jokes I make, and so on. If you read things I’ve written, even though the topics and time periods are different, it won’t be long before you’ll likely say “ohh yeah, that’s her, I can tell.”

So-o-o… great, right? That’s what we want. Except… not always? Because to be honest, I’m pretty sick of listening to myself.

Context might help—I wrote a novel that’s in the proverbial drawer, I wrote one that got published, and I am halfway through the next. So this current WIP is either my 2nd or 3rd, depending on how you count.

I’ve only published one book, so I have no real fear of my voice being particularly tedious to anyone else. (I mean, except for those who didn’t like it in the first place, but never mind them!) This is less about boring my future readers and more about how bored I am of myself!

I hope this might be a “good problem” in the sense that perhaps it means I’m growing as a writer. That I am aware of my crutches and am holding myself to a higher standard than before.

But the question is… what next? I’m finding that sometimes I dread even starting a new scene because I am already rolling my eyes at how “me” it’s going to be and ugh. Enough of her! At the same time, I write the way I write because that’s how I think. It’s not put on, in other words. I don’t want to fake a voice, that’s clearly going in the wrong direction.

Any thoughts or suggestions on this? How do we shake things up while still staying true to ourselves?

—I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing. Pipe Down Mermaids!

Dear Mermaids,

Voice is a great topic, and a challenging one to tackle because it is so individualized. I’ve done a little bit of vocal training, and I’ve also done a lot of podcasting and used dictation software for writing, so I’m going to draw on those experiences with my literal, physical voice to discuss writing voice and what you can do to change things up a bit.

The first thing I learned from voice lessons is that our physical voices are often more flexible than we think. I knew I could push my range higher, with practice; I was surprised to learn that I could also push it lower. Acting, taking a public speaking course, and reading books to my toddler all taught me just how much I could influence my audience and add nuances of meaning by making small shifts in tone and rhythm.You seem to have this notion that your writing voice is fixed and set in stone and just the way it is, but that’s far from true. Your voice won’t lose its essential character, its you-ness, if you change it, so let go of any worries you might have about being fake or too much of an imitation of others. Voice is a skill to be developed, like any other writing skill. Give yourself permission to stretch it and challenge it and expand it and enhance it. Otherwise you’ll just be stuck in that frustrating rut.

Any singer will tell you that warm-ups and exercises are crucial. They extend your range and make it easier to sing safely, without straining or harming your vocal cords. Writers tend not to do writing exercises very much once they’ve reached a certain level of experience, but you can still get a lot out of them! Try voice exercises specifically: writing ten paragraphs in the styles of ten very different writers, or retyping a page from a book with a distinctive prose style so you can get a tactile sense of how the words fit together, or writing dialogue in the voices of distinctive characters (your own or someone else’s). This isn’t about fakery but about stretching your range and learning new techniques. Once you teach yourself to write like Jane Austen or Kurt Vonnegut, it’s up to you to decide how to incorporate what you’ve learned into your own voice and style when you’re writing original work.

Writing pastiche of other authors has taught me that every writer breaks the rules in their own way. For example, Austen writes hardly any stage directions at all; her scenes of conversation are almost script-like. Yet her work is often turned into films, a testament to how easy it is to visualize her characters. Trying to imitate her style taught me a tremendous amount about how to convey emotion and mannerism in dialogue. Permitting yourself to write pastiche of daring writers will also help you permit yourself to be more daring in your original work—a great way of getting out of that boredom rut.

You say that you write the way you think, but we all think differently under different circumstances. Would deadline pressure change your voice because you’re in a hurry? Would writing for a friend give your work a more intimate tone? What about writing an epistolary story in which you entirely inhabit your characters’ voices, or trying a new genre that has different stylistic conventions? As above, these can all be brief exercises, though you may find you really like that new genre and want to stick with it for a while.

Podcasting always reminds me how weird our voices sound when we play them back to ourselves. What seems obvious to you—or sounds weird to you—when you reread your work may not register at all with your readers. If you frequently reread your own work, especially while it’s in progress, try breaking that habit. Treat your drafts like a game of Exquisite Corpse and don’t let yourself look at anything but the last paragraph. Then pick up where you left off. Inconsistencies will develop, and that’s fine; they can be smoothed out in revisions, and may teach you a few things about your subconscious understanding of the story as opposed to what you consciously intended it to be. If you keep visualizing a character as anxious and fidgety even though he started out as bold and brash, maybe that’s a hint that he’s been hiding something from you. Following it could lead you to all sorts of exciting new subplots.

You can also have your computer read your work to you (most computers have this capability hidden in the accessibility settings) and see how different it sounds in someone else’s spoken voice. The elements that you constantly notice and feel bored by may recede into the background while other elements jump out and surprise you. I know many authors who use this for catching errors like missing words and frequently repeated phrases. They’ll skim over the absent “the” a dozen times while rereading, but when they hear “I took train” they notice it immediately.

I’ve found that my writing style when I dictate is very different from my writing style when I type. When I type, I go back and tweak word choice as I write. (I rewrote that sentence four times—and this sentence twice.) That’s not possible with dictation. I also speak with a lot of comma splices and run-on sentences and digressions. When I use a pen, the difference from typing is less obvious, but I find that I write shorter sentences with simpler words and tend to take a conversational tone, maybe because the last time I regularly wrote with a pen was when I was in elementary school and keeping a diary. This is another indication that “your voice” is not a fixed and singular thing. My dictation voice, my typing voice, and my pen voice are all authentic voices for me; they’re just different. Try shifting your sense of your voice by changing the tools you write with. You may be surprised by what’s consistently you and what’s not.

Finally, you may just need a little bit of a break from writing. Anything gets boring if you’re immersed in it all the time, and you may be feeling so much pressure that you forget how to be playful. Consider taking a week or two away from it, and see if you come back refreshed and ready to spend time in your own company again.

Your inclination to push yourself and try new things is great, and will keep your work vibrant. Keep shaking things up and remembering how to have fun! Rediscovering your joy in writing will make all the boredom disappear.

I just read your post on original ideas and the derivative nature of all stories, and loved it. I struggle a lot with feeling like I’m writing “unique enough” stories to justify putting the effort into them (it doesn’t help that I can literally go through my folder of ideas/snippets/starters and pinpoint exactly what I must have been reading/watching when I came up with each idea, so I wind up feeling like obviously anyone else would notice it too—even though logically I’m fairly sure it’s not that obvious and I only notice it because it’s my own stuff).

But in similar vein… how do you create unique, original worldbuilding? The hardest part for me is magic systems—I write almost exclusively fantasy, sometimes scifi with fantasy elements—and I love including magic and witches and sorcerers, but I feel like I can’t create a unique, exciting magic system to save my life.

The example I always go back to is the Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve never seen anything remotely like the magic system in that setting, allomancy (for those who haven’t read it, some people can ingest different alloys of metals and use those to fuel various mental and physical powers; all the powers come in pairs, like Soothing vs. Rioting people’s emotions). If I could hit on something that unique, that original, just once in my life, I would be thrilled. But in the end, most of my magic systems are either bog-standard elemental-based types of things, or more generic “magic just does what you need it to do, albeit in limited quantities or with skill requirements to make it work so it’s not a complete deus ex machina device” a la D&D.

You say that “originality doesn’t mean rubbing two brain cells together until they spark an idea that bears no resemblance to any idea that anyone’s ever had” but on the other hand it feels like, in this area of things, it does mean basically that—and I’m not sure the “file off the serial numbers” approach would work, if only because if you take a particularly interesting existing system (like allomancy) for your “base” to work from, I think it would still be pretty obvious. How can I either figure out how to spark unique ideas for magic systems, or stop beating myself up for not being able to come up with entirely new, unique, original magic systems for my worlds?

—Jadelyn (they/them)

Dear Jadelyn,

I love this question as a counterpart to the question about worldbuilding from real places. There are so many ways to approach the creation of a fictional place.

As I said in my post on originality, what makes your work original is that you make unique choices that no one else would make. It sounds like that’s where you’re feeling stuck—you know your worldbuilding choices are yours, but feel that they’re not “unique enough”. Instead of looking at the word unique (or original, though those aren’t the same thing), let’s look at the word enough.

Sometimes enough means that you cook the same simple dinner or order the same takeout three nights in a row. That gets you fed and frees you up to do other things, like playing games or getting work done. Is your worldbuilding enough to do the job? Does having a basic, familiar fantasy setting let you focus on characters, plot, and prose, which is where you find joy or know you need to do more skill-building?

Sometimes enough means you have a small meal because you aren’t very hungry. Is your worldbuilding enough for your limited appetite? Are you forcing yourself to do more of it because you feel like you have to, not because it’s what you actually want?

Sometimes enough means that you buy a Hallmark Valentine’s Day card for your beloved, because you know they would rather get a sweet, simple card than a bouquet of flowers (allergies!) or dinner out (so crowded and noisy!). Is your worldbuilding enough for your readers? Are you giving them what they personally want, rather than adhering to generic notions of what a setting ought to be?

Sometimes enough means a grade of 66%, because that lets you pass the 101 class and move on to something more exciting and engaging and challenging. Is your worldbuilding enough to get your career going? Will knocking out some straightforward works now get you established so you can more confidently try more adventurous things down the road, once you’ve got a readership and an agent and a better sense of which envelopes to push?

Sometimes enough means coloring within the lines, doing exactly what’s required of you and nothing more, never sticking your neck out, being cautious, being safe. Is your worldbuilding enough to be comfortingly familiar to you and your readers, without making anyone uncomfortable or risking anything? Does trying something different make you feel like you’re tapping into deep scary parts of yourself, or bring up complicated thoughts or upsetting feelings? Do you worry that more experimental stories are less commercially viable?

Sometimes enough means quiet music and white walls and simple furniture, because that’s what creates the ambiance you want. Someone else might call it boring, but to you it’s peaceful. Is your worldbuilding enough for the mood you’re trying to create in your work? Does it give your characters room to play without being a vast expanse, and set up interesting plots without having an explosion on every corner?

Sometimes enough is drawing a stick figure because you’re new at making art. Over time, your stick figures will gain motion, emotion, dimension, detail—but you’re not there yet. Is your worldbuilding enough because it has to be, because it’s the very most that you’re capable of right now? Can you let that be enough for the projects you currently have, while you work on developing your skills for future projects?

Sometimes enough is about what feels like enough for you. That’s a thing only you can determine. But it doesn’t sound to me like any of your concerns about whether your worldbuilding is original enough stem from your dispassionate assessment of yourself or your work; it sounds like it’s about how other people will judge you. Who are those other people? Are they the people you’re writing for? If they aren’t, why does their opinion matter?

If your work were enough—if you were enough—how would you know? What are the signifiers of sufficiency, for you? Is it something you can point to? Or is it an unattainable mirage? Can you see ways to redefine “enough” and put it within your reach? Can you see ways to feel like enough right now?

Let go of the Mistborn series; your dilemma would be no different if you’d never heard of Sanderson or his books, so right now it’s just a stick you’re using to beat yourself. I guarantee you that he can look at his work and play spot-the-source all the livelong day, to a degree that no one else can because no one else has read all the books and seen all the movies and heard all the songs and lived all the history that he has. This is true of every writer. You really can’t know where someone’s ideas come from unless you live in their head. But I promise you that they come from somewhere—usually a lot of hard work and practice, and also reading and watching and listening and living. All those jokes about writers asking “can I use your tragic/funny/angsty life experience in my work” are jokes only because a lot of the time writers don’t bother to ask.

If you wanted to get very picky, you could say that Sanderson’s use of paired magical forces is drawing on the Aristotelian idea of opposing elements (which was Aristotle building on the work of Empedocles) and/or the Newtonian idea of equal and opposite pairs of physical forces (which, like all scientific advances, owes a great deal to both the observation of the world and the work of other scientists). But both of those concepts are so deeply embedded in Western culture that basing something on them is no more unoriginal than using the word the. At some point you need to decide that caring about a concept’s degree of uniqueness is a distraction from getting your writing done, and set it aside like any other distraction (too bad there are no URL blockers for persistent anxious thoughts), and focus on the work.

If you’re a relatively new writer, much of your problem may simply be that you haven’t developed your worldbuilding skills very far yet. Don’t be fooled by the mysticism of inspiration and spark-striking; those moments of epiphany are backed by a lot of learning and a lot of work. The next time you read a story with interesting worldbuilding, look at it as a craftsperson and see if you can figure out how the author did it and what makes it work so well for you. Work with mentors, critique partners, beta readers, writing teachers, agents, editors, and anyone else who can help you level up. Don’t let your impatience over being a beginner distract you from your ability to learn. See yourself as being on a path, rather than stuck in place, and make a plan for moving further down that path.

You seem to worry a lot about about the notion that “someone” (who?) will find your work lacking. To get away from that, it will help to have two things: personal goals for your work, and a sense of who you’re writing for.

If you know who your audience is (and it can be as general as “epic fantasy fans” or as specific as “my brother Jim” or “teen me”), you don’t need to guess what they like or wonder how your book fits into their personal collection; you can research it! For a genre-based audience, do some market research and see what’s selling now in that genre, what kinds of book deals are being made, who’s getting lots of buzz, who’s headlining conventions, which books get high marks from trade publications and lots of stars from Amazon and Goodreads reviewers.

Once you know your market, find your unique sweet spot between the book of your heart and the book that will reach the audience you want to reach. You might be be over at the “I will write formulaic books that hit all the bestseller buttons because all I care about is reaching the largest number of readers” end of the scale, or the “I am driven to write this specific book and I don’t really care if no one else understands it” end, or somewhere in between. You may decide to write a commercial book now and an avant-garde one later. All the options are fine. The important thing is to make some decisions about your goals for your work, so you can then evaluate whether your work is achieving those goals.

If the target audience still feels like a big looming someone who’s judging you in a mean judgy way, create an ideal reader, the way you’d create a character. Give them a name and a list of books they love (which is a fun exercise: what reading habits would set someone up to like your work?) and an exuberant eagerness for books like the one you want to write. The next time you think “No one will like this” or “Everyone will see how derivative this is”, swap that out for “Would my ideal reader think this is great?” and use your concept of them as your guide. If you’re a visual thinker, you can find a photo of someone looking kind and friendly and supportive, tape it to the corner of your monitor or make it your background image, and chat with it when you need a boost. Would you like this scene, smiling person? You look so happy just at the thought of it! I love writing for you!

For your reader, for the imagined smiling person or the real one who will someday cherish every word you write, your work isn’t merely enough—it’s exactly right. And so are you.

I’m in the planning stages of a trilogy adapting my Dungeons and Dragons character’s story to a novel format. It follows my character through her training as a knight, her fall from knightly society and loss of her homeland, regaining her honor, gathering allies and assets, and reclaiming her homeland from the rule of her half-brother and stepmother.

The first and last parts were left up to my imagination so I’m having an easier time outlining them. But the “regaining her honor and gathering allies bit” which will make up the bulk of Book 2 was played out in-game. And I’m completely stuck on how to adapt it.

I don’t want to use the campaign story because it belongs to the Game Master and my character didn’t really have a connection to the central conflict besides that fighting the bad guys was the Right Thing To Do. But I can’t think of new villains and new tensions for my character!

I have a feeling that brainstorming, developing my setting and side characters, and reading other fantasy novels for inspiration will help, but if you have any other advice, I would be most grateful.

Yours,

Book 2 Blues (she/her)

Today is the fifth Tuesday of the month, which means that my answer to this heartfelt letter is available exclusively to my Patreon patrons. If you’d like to see today’s post—and future fifth Tuesday posts—become a Story Hospital Patreon patron at any level, even just $1/month. If that’s not an option for you, enjoy reading through the archives and salivating with anticipation for next Tuesday’s column. I’ll be back before you know it.

I have an idea for a novel I’m really excited about, but I’ve got overwhelmed by some of the world/character building.

The basic idea is a take-off on a Swords and Sorcery fantasy where, because of the availability of magic, technological development has stalled, and society has become a magocracy. The story then follows a group of inventors who create and spread non-magical technology. The things they actually invent are based on real history of science, but I’ve selected things by a combination of what makes sense with my world building and things I think are cool. It’s going to end up a very anachronistic mix, but it’s also a fairly self-indulgent fantasy story, not historical fiction, so I’m not worried about that. Just in case it’s relevant, currently the plan is that most of the story would take place in a big diverse port city where people are coming and going from around the world, but it’s early days and that may change.

Even though it’s strictly secondary world fantasy the bits of real history of science come from specific places which I would like to carry over into my characters and world building and I’m stuck on how to do that.

So that I have a concrete example, one of the things I know I want to include is the invention of the printing press, which is originally Chinese in real life. The bit I’m having trouble with is coding my printing press inventor from China-inspired-fantasy-land as Chinese in a way that gets the point across without being appropriative. I’m really struggling to figure out what sort of details are good for world-building, vs what is not, how much I can trust my readers to pick up, and generally (especially given there’s a lot of anachronism in my world already) identifying the boundary between diverse world-building and smearing bits of other people’s cultures around willy-nilly.

My printer is one of my better developed characters (I’m still fairly early in the planning stages of this), but I’m seeking general advice for all my non-European characters. Please help me escape the ‘everyone’s from Britain but with the names changed’ fantasy trap.

—Dendritic Trees (she/her)

Dear Dendritic Trees,

That sounds like a very cool project. I understand your concerns about appropriation, especially when you’re working with multiple cultures and doing what amounts to a cultural mash-up. Fortunately, people of color and others with relevant experience have created some great resources on cultural appropriation and cultural sensitivity in writing, and I’m glad to bring some of them together for you.

Before I begin, I want to gratefully acknowledge that my thoughts on this topic have been significantly informed by the work of many, many writers and activists, most of whom are women of color. I’ve named and linked a few people and resources in this piece; please consider that a starting point, and invest some time in further research.

Shawl writes, “[I]t’s unrealistic for an author to expect to be awarded an embossed, beribboned certificate proclaiming the authenticity of her work.” This reminds me of a talk I went to with activists Ajay Chaudry and Eric Ward, where they discussed the idea of people seeking not only plaudits for bravely writing across color lines but absolution or forgiveness for potentially getting it wrong and hurting a reader. If you’ve had thoughts in that direction, I urge you to move away from them and look for other ways to frame your relationship to your work and your readers. No one can tell you “Congratulations, your work is guaranteed harmless!” or “You aren’t one of those white people!” with any degree of certainty, because no one speaks for all members of their cultural group. Even people from within a group can have the “authenticity” of their work questioned (Ken Liu has spoken about this, with regard to his fantasy novels influenced by Chinese history). There is no absolution; there are no clear-cut rules that you can strictly follow and thereby relieve your anxiety. There is only you, doing your best.

Bradford also links to the Australia Council for the Arts’ protocols for working with Indigenous artists. Some elements of these are specific to Indigenous Australian cultures and their history with white colonizers, but reading the guidelines on writing, which include information for non-Indigenous writers writing on Indigenous themes, will give you some idea of the types of pitfalls you might run into as you address any culture not your own, especially those that have been repeatedly appropriated. These bullet points are particularly apropos, I think:

Some important questions to consider about interpretation are:

How will your writing affect the Indigenous group it is based on?

Does it empower them?

Does it expose confidential or personal and sensitive material?

Does it reinforce negative stereotypes?

If you want to shift away from worrying about or seeking advance absolution for harm you might potentially cause, try focusing on that second question of whether your work empowers the people you’re writing about. Another approach is Rose Lemberg’s model of “unbreaking the reader”. What would make your portrayal of (your fantasy equivalent of) China healing, satisfying, and empowering for a reader of Chinese descent?

Obviously you will need to do your research; less often discussed is the notion of honoring your sources. Consider including a research bibliography in the back of your novel. You can use the acknowledgments section to highlight teachers, librarians, essayists, sensitivity readers, and others whose assistance made your book a rich and thoughtful and unbreaking portrayal of its various cultures. (Make sure you get permission from anyone you want to name.)

One of the major concerns about appropriation is economic exploitation, the use of another culture’s stories or history to enrich yourself. Donating a portion of your proceeds to one or more appropriate nonprofits is one way to address that concern. (I recommend the Carl Brandon Society, which supports people of color in the SF/F writing field.) Hiring and paying sensitivity readers is another good way to directly support people with roots in the cultures you’re writing about. You can also include writers from those cultures in your promotions for your book, with paired giveaways and joint book signing events, and promote those writers and their work separately from promoting your own work.

1) how many writers from the culture you wish to represent have been published in your country writing in the same language you will use (i.e. English) to write the story, 2) why do you think you’re the best person to write this story? 3) who will benefit if you write this story? 4) why are you writing this story? 5) who is your intended audience? 6) if the people/culture you are selecting to write about has not had enough time, historically and structurally, to tell their story first, on their own terms, should you be occupying this space?

These aren’t rhetorical questions; it is quite possible for you to think hard about them and decide to move forward with your project in an ethical fashion. As Goto and Shawl both observe, saying that white writers can only write about white people is its own contribution to erasure. As I’ve noted in the past, you are absolutely allowed to write outside your own experience. If this is the story your heart longs to tell, by all means tell it! Just be willing to put in the work: do research, hire sensitivity readers, excavate your internalized biases, and keep the marginalized reader foremost in your thoughts. Your book will be all the better for it.

]]>https://storyhospital.com/2018/01/23/79-ethical-worldbuilding-from-real-places/feed/4storynurse#78: How Much Should Your Research Show?https://storyhospital.com/2018/01/16/78-how-much-should-your-research-show/
https://storyhospital.com/2018/01/16/78-how-much-should-your-research-show/#commentsTue, 16 Jan 2018 15:00:46 +0000http://storyhospital.com/?p=10183

Dear Story Nurse,

I’m in the planning phases of a time travel short story, and I find myself wondering how much research is too much. What’s a good way to find the line between authenticity and overdoing it?

—ASB (he/him)

Dear ASB,

There are two people for whom research might be “too much”: you, and your reader. For you, it’s too much if it prevents you from writing, or if your investment in research outweighs its return. For your reader, it’s too much if it it prevents them from enjoying the story.

Some general rules for any story set anywhere:

If your story is intended to transport your readers to a particular time and place and focus on the experience of life there, then you will need more detail and accuracy. If it’s intended to be a plotty adventure, you can skimp on the scenery.

More description often means a slower pace. (This isn’t necessarily a bad thing!)

Focus on the elements of the setting that the protagonist cares about. Make your descriptions relevant to the plot and character development.

Research is like an iceberg: 90% of it goes unseen, but its weight gives significant solidity and momentum to the 10% that shows up on the page. For example, research will help you make a long list of words people didn’t say, clothes they didn’t wear, and attitudes they didn’t have; your omission of those things matters as much to the realism of the story as your inclusion of historically accurate elements.

Prioritize the 21st-century reader’s enjoyment of the story over meticulous accuracy, even if that means tweaking dates of historical events, creating characters who approve of things like sexual consent and interracial relationships, and not mentioning that everyone’s teeth were rotten or fake.

Research should serve the writing of the story, not distract you from it or overwhelm you.

The specifics of this will differ from person to person and project to project. I spent a full year doing research for one of my books in progress, and I don’t regret it at all; it was interesting and fun in its own right, it helped me figure out several important subplots to the story, and it gave me confidence in my writing. But another year would be too much, and would really be a way of procrastinating. A year’s investment in research felt proportional for a novel, but I wouldn’t put that much time or effort into researching for a short story unless I was planning to write a series of them. It’s up to you to determine what feels excessive, and to be honest with yourself when you’re researching out of avoidance rather than because there’s information you really need.

Also keep in mind that you can write before you research. Some background knowledge is useful to keep you from predicating your story on an impossibility (unless you do that on purpose), but once you’ve got the basics, try outlining or even writing a first draft, and using that to direct your research into details. For example, I’m writing a historical story right now and casually threw in a bit about one of the characters liking theater. This developed into a throughline for the story, and now I need to research the theater of the era, but I don’t have to do that up front. I can write scenes where the characters go to see [PLAY] and comment on the talent of [FAMOUS ACTRESS], and when I’ve finished drafting, I’ll do the research I need to fill in those blanks. The same goes for things like “she walked across the [floorboards? carpet?]” or “he admired her dress, which was [description goes here]”. There’s value in serendipity, and fun in wandering around a time and place, but don’t get too caught up in doing research that you might never use. I don’t have to read all of Shakespeare’s works to have one of my characters quote him; I just need to do a quick search for “shakespeare quote [topic]”, pick something that sounds right, and move on.

Writing first and researching second is a good idea if you’re easily daunted by the thought of getting everything just right. The more you research, the more you’ll realize how little you know, and then you may feel discouraged rather than inspired. Writing first narrows the list of things you need to learn and helps you keep from burning out.

As you’re doing your research, be sure to organize it in ways that will be useful to you as you write and revise. Nothing’s worse than knowing you found exactly the right historical figure, fact, object, quote, or event but not being able to put your hands on it when you need it.

From the reader’s perspective, it helps to know your target audience and what they’re looking for from a story like yours. There are certainly people who know vast amounts about history and will nitpick every detail of a gown or a dance or a meal, but most readers of time travel stories won’t notice these infelicities unless something is really egregiously and obviously out of place, like a 12th-century Scotsman saying “Okie-dokie!” or living in a duplex apartment.

When you incorporate your research into your story, do it with a light touch. Keep your protagonist’s or narrator’s perspective at the front of your mind; don’t harp on the things that they will find unremarkable or irrelevant. If this is your 22nd-century time traveler’s fifth visit to the court of Louis XIV, they probably won’t go on and on about everyone speaking French. Even if your protagonist is a wide-eyed tourist, stay focused on their plot obligations and personal goals. Be especially wary of scenes where people tell one another things they already know, or describe ordinary objects or actions in extremely meticulous terms. Here’s an only slightly exaggerated example of what you don’t want:

“I had the best time in 2017 New York,” Johanna gushed to Johann. “I remembered you telling me how much you liked riding the public transportation system, so I tried it and it was just the most fun! You have to swipe a tiny plastic card through a little slot in just the right way, and then you walk through various tunnels and up and down stairs to get to the train you want. Each train has eight cars, except for some that have two or ten or eleven, and there is a person who rides in a funny little box in the middle of the train and sticks their head out of the window at every stop. There are two different widths of train car, isn’t that interesting? But of course you know all this, you were the one telling me that the Q train is so much nicer than the 3 train.”

The 1317 Rome version of this is exactly as boring as the 2017 New York version. If your characters sound like they’re reciting Wikipedia articles, something has gone awry.

There will be times when you want to convey something to the reader that the protagonist already knows and finds uninteresting, such as that people in Tudor England wore linen undergarments and changed them daily. “She took off her linen smock, as she did every day, because frequently changing her underclothes helped keep her smelling nice” is an uninteresting recitation of factoids. Instead, find an emotional hook, some reason for her to care about her smock. Is it torn? Did she see a nice one in the market that she couldn’t afford? Does she hate washing it because the soap makes her hands red? Did a friend complain to her about another woman whose body odor suggests she’s not changing or washing her underclothes often enough? Can you show her personality through whether she carefully folds the smock or leaves it carelessly draped over a chair? Or you may realize that any of those things would be a distraction from the story, and omit the information: “She changed into her night clothes and lay down, hoping sleep would come quickly.”

If possible, run your story past multiple beta readers who will tell you whether you’re making it too much of a travelogue (or, on the flip side, whether your depiction of 1317 Rome is indistinguishable from 2017 New York). Expect to do a few rounds of revision while you get the balance right. And then let it go, and move on to the next story, which will encourage you to learn entirely new and different things—one of the great side benefits of writing.

I recently finished the first draft of my novel—a mystery set in a pretty traditional fantasy land. The problem? When I did the final word count, it came out to 27K. I’m doing the first round of editing—well, mostly adding scenes that I missed the first time around—and at the rate I’m going, it’s going to roughly double my wordcount, which still won’t bring me to the 80–90K typical of the genre. And I definitely do want this work to be a novel, not a novella. Retooling it for the typically shorter YA market would involve excising a lot of themes important to the story. So how can I get my wordcount up without adding unnecessary fluff?

—Wannabe Novelist (he/him)

Dear Wannabe Novelist,

There are two ways to approach this dilemma. One is the philosophical approach: the story is the length it wants to be, and there isn’t much that you can do about that. The other is the engineering approach: there needs to be enough story structure to support the story’s length, or the whole thing will collapse and that will be sad. I’m going to get into the engineering approach a bit, but I want you to keep the philosophical one in mind, because there are very good reasons that most of the seasoned writers I know tend to end up thinking of story length in those terms.

An engineering-minded writer once told me that he builds a story the way he builds a table. So let’s talk about tables.

Your basic table has four legs and a top. The legs are there to support the top. Spindly legs that might support a smaller tabletop won’t support a larger one; either the legs will break or the table will sag down the middle. In story terms, that sag down the middle is the most common failure mode for a story that’s too long for the amount of plot and character development it has. The beginning and end may seem pretty sturdy, but the middle feels slow and boring and like you’re just pushing through it to get to the good parts. No one wants this, especially for a mystery.

The engineering of (most) mystery plots is somewhat more complicated than the engineering of (most) tables, but for your purposes the big concern is that mysteries often already suffer from saggy middles. The setup is full of questions! The ending is full of drama! In between you have to pace things very carefully to stay just the right amount ahead of your reader. If you try to stretch or pad that out, you’re going to run into trouble pretty quickly.

So you’ve got that saggy-middle table. How do you fix it? Two fairly straightforward ways are to run a crossbrace diagonally from the left front leg to the right rear leg, or to add another pair of legs in the middle. In story terms, the crossbrace is an additional plot, and the additional pair of legs is an arc conclusion that has both the satisfaction of an ending and the anticipation of a new beginning.

Your additional plot could be another mystery plot. It could be a romantic plot. It could be a political intrigue plot. It could be a second viewpoint character who has their own story that intersects the story of your original protagonist. There are lots of ways to do this. (Maybe you’re already thinking of some! If so, that’s a good sign.) This is a great way to go if you need to really bulk up your word count. How you weave that plot into your existing one is up to you, but don’t skimp on it! It’s holding up nearly half the words; it needs to be sturdy. This is how George R.R. Martin keeps readers reading through hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of A Song of Ice and Fire: each of his characters has their own vivid and complex story, and he has lots of characters (despite attrition).

Mid-story arc conclusions are a little trickier, but can be pretty enjoyable both to write and to read. Take a minor plot or character from the first half of the story and a minor plot or character from the second half, and flesh them both out. Neither one needs to be a full story, but each one needs to have a satisfying arc-like feel. The first one should start near the start of the mystery plot and end somewhere near the middle, and the second should start somewhere near the middle and end near the end. It’s fine if they overlap, and they don’t need to be connected in any way, overtly or thematically. They just need to give the reader some grounding while the main mystery plot is still full of questions and uncertainty.

Keep in mind that when I talk about supporting the word count, what I’m really talking about is supporting the reader. When we say book middles sag, we mean that the reader’s attention drifts. Adding more story encourages the reader to keep paying attention, because there’s plenty (but not too much) to pay attention to. I talk a little more about this in my post on maintaining story momentum, which would probably also be useful for you.

You may have noticed that none of this is about how to make your core story longer. That brings us back to the philosophical approach, which I do generally subscribe to. The shape of your mystery plot is what it is. A skilled editor or beta reader might be able to point to places where it could be fleshed out, and it’s always possible that you’ve significantly underwritten it, but if you’ve got a draft that feels complete except for not having hit a particular word count target, then that story has said all it wants to say. It can be very frustrating when a story doesn’t listen to things that you know are important commercially, like genre expectations for manuscript length, or like you having a contract to deliver a short story and getting an idea that clearly wants to be a novel. But that’s part of writing, no matter how much of an engineer you are. Writing marries intuition to intellect, and sometimes the intuition part means you just know when the thing is done and no amount of hacking at it will make it not be done.

Fortunately, you can write more stories, which is what my suggestions amount to. You can also literally write another story: break your 55k into two parts, write another 25k, and call it a trilogy. Sometimes three little tables pushed together is the best way to make one big one. Or you can write another story in a different sense: learn all the lessons you can from this one, pat it lovingly, and put it in a drawer, where it will live quietly until the day you realize that what you really need is a fantasy mystery novella. In the meantime, find another idea that’s more suited to being developed into a novel.

Knowing what length a story idea wants to be is something that will come with time and practice. In the meantime, these things will happen. Don’t stress over it too much. Maybe your revision efforts will lead to a wondrous mechanical table that folds up flat or expands to seat twenty. Maybe you’ll end up with a pile of kindling. (Always save copies of your drafts before revising them!) No matter what, you’ll learn something important for the next project. And eventually, you’ll find some Goldilocks combination of concept and length that’s just exactly right for what you need.

I think this is a very common anxiety, especially among those of us who tend to write first drafts that we really like, or who draft a lot more than we revise. Drafting and revising are two different skills, and if you’re more skilled at drafting, revision can feel very clumsy and awkward by comparison.

To start with, if you’re not sure what revision entails or should entail, take a look at my post on “What is revision?”. That will get you grounded in the basics.

Next, put your work in some format that makes it very easy to save copies. Google Drive keeps a history of all changes made to a file. Scrivener saves history files; this can get a little wonky when used with DropBox or Google Drive, so make sure Scrivener is set to save directly to a folder on your hard drive and then use the DropBox or Google Drive app to automatically back that folder up. Or you can manually save each draft as a separate file. However you go about it, make sure you have a way to go back to where you were. That way, no change you make is permanent, and if you decide you dislike it, you can undo it. Backups render your beautiful draft impervious to ruination.

I almost always recommend finishing a draft before revising it, and I especially recommend that in this case. If revising makes you anxious, and you revise before a draft is finished, that anxiety can get in the way of finishing it at all.

When you do finish a draft, practice revising it, even if you’re pretty happy with it. Revision is a skill, or a set of skills, that you can develop with some time and effort; the more you revise, the less it will stress you. Besides, no draft is perfect.

Getting assistance from someone who’s good at revisions is always a good idea, especially if you know it’s not your strong suit. In addition to talking to editors and beta readers, ask around among your writer friends and see whether you can find someone who feels they’re a much better reviser than drafter. They may be able to give you good tips from a writer’s perspective (and maybe you can share some in return).

Most importantly, less on the technical side than on the relationship-with-work side, get to know the core concepts of your work. If you’re the analytical sort, analyze your draft closely, making notes on what you feel is central to it, what you love about it, what you’re most afraid of ruining with your revisions. If you’re more in touch with your emotions, reread your draft and seek out the parts that make your heart sing, as a reader and as a writer. Revision is ideally done in service to the work. When you have a strong, clear idea of what your work is and what it’s trying to be, you’ll have a much easier time helping it along its path.

I’ve started a project that’s purely for fun and low pressure. It’s a collection of short erotica stories with genre flavor. Fantasy, sci-fi, superhero, maybe a dip into some public domain stuff like Arthurian legend.

I want to make my collection diverse and not just feature people like me. It would get boring and unrealistic if only white, bi, depressed cis women were featured! But since I’m writing erotica I’m worried I’ll fetishize people and include harmful tropes. I know about some tropes to avoid like the plague, but I’m not an expert. I don’t want to hurt people with my writing! How do I avoid this stuff?

Yours,

Social Justice Pornographer (she/her)

Dear Social Justice Pornographer,

What a great question! Since this is outside my area of expertise, I invited guest contributor Cecilia Tan (she/her) to write a response.

After over 20 years publishing erotic science fiction with Circlet Press and writing erotic fiction herself whenever she could get the time, Cecilia made a career pivot into erotic romance. She’s now an award-winning romance writer, but her heart remains in erotic SF/F, she’s still the editorial director of Circlet Press, and she’s launching an erotic urban fantasy series with Tor Books in September with the book Initiates of the Blood.

Many thanks to the Patreon patrons and others (including you, letter writer!) whose support enabled me to pay Cecilia an honorarium for her work. (You can also support Circlet on Patreon.) I’m very pleased to be able to bring her words to you.

Cheers,

Story Nurse

Cecilia Tan writes:

Dear Social Justice Pornographer,

I’m honored to be asked to address your question and must confess right off the bat that your collection sounds like the kind of thing I’d love to read. Given that I’ve been reading Circlet’s slush pile and submissions for 26 years, I can assure you your concerns are valid, but by being aware of the issues you’ve already taken the major first step toward being able to address them in your work.

I feel every writer may benefit from the understanding that their work does not exist in a vacuum, and that there is a relationship between writer and reader. Sometimes it’s important to temporarily “forget” that while in the act of creation—if your muse is prone to clam up when you think too much about the reader, for example, or if considering the reader empowers your internal censor to the point that you don’t write anything at all—but ultimately, after the story is written, if you’re thinking about publishing it, you are thinking about sharing it with other human beings who may be affected by it. Fiction has a special ability to slip past internal defenses, which is why it can hurt so deeply if we feel betrayed by a story.

The fact that you are concerned about fetishizing people likely means you already understand that fiction can perpetuate harm. Stereotypes can be a vehicle to perpetuate bias, racism, or misogyny. Fetishization is erotic fiction’s special catch-22, in which stereotypes are not only present in the story, they’re exploited for sexual gratification. And yet… isn’t sexual gratification the point of an erotic story?

Let me say first that I don’t believe exploitation for sexual gratification to be “worse” than exploitation or harmful representation of other kinds. Sex is not a crime, and liking sex or writing erotica is not inherently morally reprehensible, even though some segments of society would like us to think so. However, if fiction already has the power to slip past our defenses and cut deeply, erotic fiction in particular cuts right at the core of many people’s most closely guarded private selves. As an Asian-American woman, I might find some racist caricatures of Asians laughable and ignore them, while Asian fetishization in an erotic story, though equally dehumanizing, might feel much more personal and difficult to ignore.

Likewise, erotic stories often feel especially personal to the author, which can make accepting criticism of them much more difficult, too. When we write down erotic fantasies, it can be a very empowering act, very freeing to the self and the psyche, but it can also make us very vulnerable by exposing such privately held thoughts to the world. But that is also why erotica is crucial writing, and especially important in the midst of our largely sex-negative, sex-judgmental culture. Erotica truly can be social justice work.

That’s all preamble to my actual advice which is, first of all, write. You can’t fix what doesn’t exist, so don’t let the fear that you might do wrong paralyze you into not writing in the first place, nor stop you from trying to do good in the world by writing diversely.

The second step is to examine the stance of your story toward the characters in it who are not like you. “Othering” is a verb that encompasses many possible things, all of them bad. Have you set them on a pedestal as an example of all that is noble? While that might seem laudable on the surface, it’s still dehumanizing and othering. Are you using your trans character as a metaphor for your own desire to remake yourself as a new person? People aren’t metaphors, but it can be argued that all fiction is. If the only reason a trans character is there is to be a metaphorical stand-in, then once again they’ve been dehumanized. Have you portrayed a character as a three-dimensional, realistic human? Then you’re doing well and it’s win-win, because fully three-dimensional characters aren’t just less likely to be harmful representations, they’re also good writing.

The third step, after you’ve examined your perspective, is the hardest part, which is to have others examine your perspective as well. From within we can only expand our vision so much, and it takes the help of others to extend that view. When writing erotica it’s important to find beta readers and sensitivity readers who aren’t of the opinion that all porn is inherently exploitative. (There are still some people who think that.) And ideally, if you’re writing about a member of a certain group, you’ll want feedback from members of that group. Only the people you are writing about can tell you whether they feel respected or disrespected by your representation.

Finally, it’s good to bear in mind that the more marginalized the group or identity of the person, the more likely they are to have been subjected to harmful representation, and so the more likely they are to be critical. When people see the same mistakes again and again, they may get less patient about correcting them. Rather than being defensive if you are called out on a common mistake, try to realize why you made that mistake (from your more privileged position, did you imagine the experience of a marginalized person inaccurately? Did you put yourself in the position of “savior” in a way that dehumanized those you were supposedly aiding? etc.) and don’t just pledge to do better, but examine whether you can improve your perspective to avoid that pitfall in the future.

I truly believe in erotica writing as a form of social justice. Our society heaps so much guilt and shame onto sex and sexuality, but a writer who breaks past that to celebrate and empower their own sexuality can empower their readers to do the same. Imagining and inhabiting spaces free of that shame via fiction is one of the most powerful tools we have toward creating those spaces in real life, and it’s laudable to want that freedom for all.

I know this probably looks like a troll letter, but I swear it’s a real problem I’ve got with one of my characters! Even I had trouble believing it at first. Long story short, I spent ten years working on a manuscript and just now accidentally realized that one of my secondary protagonists sounds a lot like Hitler.

This fellow is an elected monarch who is doing a terrible job of running his kingdom. He’s cut off his citizens from having very much direct contact with him, and he has an art hobby that has taken precedence over his actual duties. Amazingly, over several decades, he barely improves. It’s not the kind of art hobby that can be quickly changed to something else, either.

He was once a refugee from an aggressor continent that frowned upon the arts in general, and his poor artistic abilities directly trigger the driving conflict of the story. I know, this sounds like a neutral character at best, but the main protagonist ropes him into their quest in the third act, when his kingdom’s been taken over and he’s in hiding, because they’re the only person in the kingdom who genuinely likes looking at his art. He’s practically the visual artistic equivalent of Florence Foster Jenkins here. Eventually, the exile, coming clean about his part in accidentally creating the antagonist, and reconciling with some friends he’d abandoned over the years convince him that the townspeople don’t all hate him as much as he thinks they do, and he’s still redeemable as both a monarch and an artist. It doesn’t happen as neatly and easily as it seems to for the purpose of this letter.

I seriously considered turning him into a woman, because that’s solved a lot of quandaries in the past for me, but that would affect another plot point involving (independently of each other) a plot-relevant shirtless scene and a small handful of one-sided romances. I’d really like to keep this as PG as possible, so topless lady NotHitler is out for now. I figured the best way to attack this problem from here was to research Hitler and Nazi Germany and make sure this guy isn’t doing anything else that runs suspect. My browsing history has probably reached full-on “IT’S FOR A BOOK I SWEAR!” saturation.

NotHitler never commits a genocide or any unprovoked acts of aggression towards other world powers or groups of people. If I make him even more of an introvert and significantly more often taking a defensive stance than an offensive one, would that be enough, or would I have to seriously uproot a good chunk of this story’s foundation to make it work? I may not be a troll, but I know a lot of trolls would probably be quick to jump the gun if they see anything even remotely Hitlery. The last thing I’d want in my life is a bunch of readers accusing me of being a Nazi sympathizer because I redeemed a character that reminded them of Hitler.

If you’ve made it this far, I cannot thank you enough for staying with me. I can barely believe this is a real problem I’ve run into. But hey, better to go down as the guy who realized he accidentally wrote Hitler before publication than the guy who had to be told he accidentally wrote Hitler by the readers, right?

—Not a Nazi (he/him)

Dear Not a Nazi,

You are vastly, vastly overthinking this. Leave the character as he is and don’t worry about it. If you really want to be careful, run it past a targeted beta reader who’s an expert on WWII, or show the character enjoying a steak dinner and talking about how much he hates facial hair. But nothing in your description makes me think “whoa, totally Hitler!”, even with the context that you think this character is Hitleresque. I think you’re safe.

This excessive concern over a minor matter sounds like the product of an anxious aversion to declaring the book finished. If you’ve spent ten years on your manuscript and you’re starting to fuss over non-problems, I recommend submitting or self-publishing it as quickly as possible so you can move on. When you’ve worked on one project for that long, it can be hard to imagine your life without it, but both you and the book need some closure. Empty your browser cache with a clean conscience and keep moving toward The End. You’ll be glad you did.